Thursday, December 12, 2013

During the past week, I have been reading the twenty
stories in the 2013 O. Henry Prize
Stories collection. Although there are stories by writers I have always
admired—Deborah Eisenberg, Anne Beattie, Andrea Barrett, and Alice Munro--I
have not enjoyed this collection as much as I did the 2013 Best American Short Stories, which I read in November. So forgive my lack of enthusiasm in what follows.

I won't comment on Jamie Quatro's
"Sinkhole" or Alice Munro's "Leaving Waverly," since I
posted blogs on both those stories on April 22 and Jan. 12, 2012. I will comment briefly on the others in no
particular order, discussing ten this week and the remaining eight next week..

Polly
Rosenwaike, "White Carnations"

Rosenwaikie's Notes at the end of the book indicate
that this story is part of a collection in progress about pregnancy and new
motherhood.I am always a bit suspicious
of stories cold-bloodedly written to fulfill a scheme, preferring rather
stories that seem to spring from something obsessive that the writer discovers
in the process of writing. This story begins a bit too cutely-smart for my
tastes, with some women meeting regularly on Mother's Day at a pub frequented
by gay men and regular drunks although the narrator pointedly notes that they
no longer have mothers and are not mothers themselves. Thenarrator is pregnant after a one-nighter, and
has decided not to have an abortion. Much of the story focuses on the narrator's
summary of her mother's own pregnancy and her thoughts about her pregnancy; it
ends with an image of two pregnant women—one eager and one reluctant—sharing
their news.It's not the subject matter
that fails to interest me here, but rather the flat, self-centered and
self-conscious, way that the story is told.

Derek
Palacio "Sugarcane"

This is about the experience of a doctor in
post-revolutionary Cuba who has an affair with a seamstress and who mentors the
son of a plantation manager, in return for extra sugar, which—both sweet and
bitter because of regulation--becomes the central of the story. Although ostensibly the story is
about the doctor being torn between a desire to leave and a desire to stay, it
really centers on the political/cultural context of Cuba at this particular
time in its history. The long dialogue
section between the doctor and the seamstress and the prolonged child delivery
scene witnessed by the boy seem more filler than thematically essential.

Tash
Aw, "Sail"

The story centers on a Chinese man who has been
involved in a minor way in the Tiananmen Square protests and wants to be a
political writer; however, he has
instead become a wealthy businessman. He is married to a successful woman who
seems more businesslike than passionate and has an affair with an English woman
he has hired to help him improve his English.
The story seems inconsequential until a surprising final scene when the
man is on the verge of killing his mistress; up to that point, it has no real
significance except some vague connection between the man's minor political
experiences and his current sense of purposelessness.

Donald
Antrim, "He Knew"

This is one
of those sophisticated New York yuppie stories that usually fail to involve me.
Stephen and Alice, a married couple, are taking a walk up Madison Avenue,
passing lots of expensive shops, taking prescription drugs for depression and
anxiety.He is an actor who specializes
in comic roles, but not getting much work. She has suffered a breakdown.They walk and talk and take their meds in
what is basically a great stylized exercise about the life of two people who
are bound together in a fragile yet inescapable way.I suppose I should care about them, but I
just don't.

Asako
Serizawa, "The Visitor"

The story takes place on an afternoon in postwar
Japan, when a middle-aged woman is visited by a soldier who claims to have
known her son during the war. The encounter is fraught with some tacit tension,
partially because the woman is afraid of the man and partially because she
dreads what he has to tell her about her son, who went missing during the war
and has never been found. I found the
story too easy and predictable—both in the writing and in the plotting and
characterization. Take the following bit of what seems to me to be careless
prose: The woman pours the man some tea and offers him food, saying she
"nudged the noodles toward him." Then a few lines later she wonders
how she might "nudge" him out the door. I know that might seem minor,
but two "nudges" in a row seems careless to me. The story ends with a
revelation about her son that makes a "sharp chill snake up her
spine."

Joan Silber, "Two
Opinions"

At over thirty pages, this is the second longest
story in the collection and is perhaps the most "novelistic," for it
is something of a summary of one woman's life.
Although ostensibly the story centers on the theme suggested by the
title—Louise's ability to hold two opposing opinions at once—it actually
focuses on her life in the shadow of her war-protester father and the ghost of
her husband, who departs for a teaching job in Okinawa and basically never
really returns. Her two opinions—that she is against war like her father, yet
at the same time approves of the end of the Nazi persecution—is not really
thematically relevant to her life with and without her husband. She is a woman
of relatively simple animal and domestic pleasures, not an ideologue like her
mother and father, although her mother scolds her, "You think you can do
without ideas but you can't." Too novelistic for me.

Melinda
Moustakis, "They Find the Drowned"

This is a modular story, written in several short
sections. But for this kind of story to
work, there has to be some cohesion. The pieces alternate back and forth
between scientific observations about a river and its inhabitants and the
experiences of a woman living in the wilds of Alaska. The title sentence is
from one of the scientific sections: "They find the drowned don't have
liquid in their lungs—they gasp in the cold water until their tracheas
collapse." Although the individual
sections are tightly written, lyrical prose poems, this is less a story than a
poetic rhapsody about the natural world and those that live in the wilds.

George
McCormick, "The Mexican"

This short, simple story about a boy who works
during the summer on refrigerator train cars would not be a story at all
without the final paragraph, when the boy has become a man and tells his own
boys a different story than what actually happened. When a huge block of ice
falls through a rail car on to a load of oranges below it, the boy is told to
go down and open the boxcar from the inside to get the ice out. When he does
so, he sees a Mexican man hiding in a small space beside the door, who walks
past him and disappears into the oranges "like a snake into a river."
In the final paragraph he tells his boys a story without ice and no Mexican,
but rather about Mexican steers breaking loose from a boxcar and running out
into the plains. The story ends: "I tell them this story because in the
West what we love most are lies. What we
love are images of a stampede, of animals running; of what we think are the
right stories of stealing away." This is a nice example of the importance
of endings for the short story.

Nalini
Jones, "Tiger"

Jones says in the Writing Notes at the end of the
book that she wrote this story to try to discover something about the mother Essie, who is a character in a
novel she is writing. Eventually she said she discovered it was not part of a novel at all, but was becoming something entirely
different. I like this story precisely because it is a
story, not a chapter in a novel, because it seems self-sustaining and complete
in itself, not requiring anything else at all to make it whole. Essie's discovery
of the lump in her breast and her use of this to try to bind her daughter
closer to her and keep her home all seems entirely believable because Jones's
telling of the story is appropriately restrained. The mother is the tiger in
this story, using whatever means possible to take care of her young and keep them
close. Her lies to both daughter and granddaughter seem entirely justified and
understandable.

Lily
Tuck, "Perou"

This is a delicate story told in the risky point of
view of a small child, beginning with her infancy in a pram, up to age five,
when she and her mother were living in Lima, Peru, having escaped the Nazi
invasion of France during World War II.
The story primarily focuses on the child's perception of her nanny, a
19-24-year-old French girl, compelled to leave her family to care for the
child. The story is really about the
child's sympathetic identification with her nanny Jeanne, with whom, of course,
she is much too young to identify. The adult teller of the story sympathizes
with the loneliness and exploitation of Jeanne, who seems destined to remain an
exile from her homeland in Perou or Peru.

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."